November 15, 2008

You may have noticed that I've started making more specific tags -- the various labels at the end of each post. There are so many posts on this blog that huge numbers build up in the broad tag categories. The "Obama" tag has 896 posts.

When I first started doing tags, I tried to keep it general, with things like "animals." Now, when I have a post about an animal, I make a tag for the specific animal. Then, I do a search for all the old posts with that animal, and I'm always amused when some particular animal has been the subject of a lot of old posts. Of course, there are many old posts for "dog" and "squirrel," but I was delighted to find out, after I did a new "alligator" post, that I had 10 posts that could take the "alligator" tag. I had no idea I'd been writing about dolphins.

And today, when I created the "lobster" tag, I saw that I had 16 posts that deserved it. I clicked on the tag to see a page of miscellaneous old posts. I'd forgotten the time we murdered a lobster for dinner. (Recipe for Chilled Pea Soup with Lobster, Crème Fraiche and Wilted Watercress reachable through that link.) "We were just squealing and shooting photographs a la Annie Hall." I wrote that back in 2005, so it not only pre-dated tags, it pre-dated YouTube. It makes me want to do this now:

I love all the many ways the blog lets me reach into the past 5 years.

(1) And now with the more specific tags, it has become clear that Professor Althouse is well on her way to creating the most perfectly structured free-form art project ever in the history of the entire Universe.

(2) It's all too much for me to takeThe love that's shining all around youEverywhere, it's what you makeFor us to take, it's all too much

I love all of the tags here. Tags are almost as important as the title of the post. Speaking of titles, why does Althouse always use punctuation in her titles? It bothers me. Specifically, it's the periods. They're not needed in titles, unless it's part of a quote or you have more than one sentence in your title.

Would you title an essay with a period? What about a book? Imagine looking at a book cover and seeing a period after the title...crazy!

Moby Dick.

The Bible.

The Scarlet Letter.

See, it's weird. Blog post titles do not need periods because they are titles, not a part of the text of your post, in my opinion.

"Speaking of titles, why does Althouse always use punctuation in her titles?"

There is a reason for this long-standing practice. Look at the first month of this blog. Scroll all the way to the bottom. See? No titles. Now look at the top of that month. Something title-like was created by beginning the post in bold face. Since that was continuous with the rest of the post, there needed to be a period. By the second month of the blog, I had the practice of putting the first sentence in bold face as a title.

I don't know if there was a way to do titles back then in a separate font on a separate line in the template I was using at the time. I can't remember. But I see that I started making separate line titles in May 2004. If you scroll down you can see that post in the old format is on May 1st. May 2d, I have my first real title on a separate line, and I retain the convention of ending the title-like beginning with a period. I think that part of it was a stylistic choice, but part of that I thought I might go back to the old format, with the title merged with the post, and the period would need to be there.

Once that decision was made, it was a matter of consistency, which is why I do it now. I know it bugs some people. I hope that this explanation helps you adjust and that you feel better now?